Conservatives: If You Can't Win the Presidency, Make It Weaker

It's one thing to expand executive powers when your guy is in the White House—but what if the other party holds the Oval Office? That's what elite conservative legal minds were mulling at an American Enterprise Institute event Friday headlined "Founders betrayed? New threats to US democracy and rule of law." Conservative luminaries, including Bush-era torture-justifier John Yoo, warned of a grave constitutional threat in the Obama administration's use of executive power.

CATO institute fellow Nicholas Rosenkranz said Obama had seized a "vast amount of executive power" by allowing people who entered the country illegally as children to stay (though as my colleague Adam Serwer pointed out last summer, presidents from both parties have long claimed the authority to grant stays of deportation). He was also concerned about the possibility that the DOJ may decline to enforce federal drug laws in states that recently legalized pot. (This coming from the same school of thought that says the 10th amendment allows states to ignore federal laws they don't like.) "For those of you who are nervous about some of the tendencies of of this particular president," Rosencranz said, "I would keep your eye on the executive choices like declining to execute law."